Unique Musical Voices

Michael shared a video of a commercial from the 1960s with me (for reasons I do not need to discuss here), and I immediately recognized Julius Baker's flute playing in the soundtrack. It was as clear to me as it would have been if it had been his speaking voice, a voice I haven't heard for a couple of decades.

I came of flute-playing age in a world where everyone was trying to sound like Julius Baker. My teacher and his generation of Baker students had successfully "cloned" what people referred to as "the Baker sound." People even referred to his students as coming "out of the Bakery."

I started that way too. I prepared for my Juilliard audition by listening very carefully to a recording of Julius Baker playing the slow movement of a Mozart concerto, and made a little mark every time he changed color. During my audition I changed either my tone color or my dynamic to something different from what I had been doing at crucial points. I guess it worked. He took me as a student.

Julius Baker taught by example. He phrased by instinct, while playing the notes exactly as written with excellent rhythm, excellent intonation, and a beautiful sound in every register and every dynamic. He never talked about musical structure, physical form, support, or breathing. 

His secret to teaching was being able to pick students he thought would be successful. He loved being surrounded with adoring students, and was particularly impressed with the ones who could play the piano, as well as the ones who were attractive. He valued appearances, and encouraged me to dress better than I did. He was right: people judge female flutists by how they look. I had no clue how to dress.

Julius Baker was a beekeeper who lived with his wife and children on a small farm (Baker’s Acres) growing mostly wildflowers for the bees. He learned to weld from his hospital roommate (he was there recovering from a heart attack). He jogged every morning, and encouraged his students to do the same. He was a ham radio operator, and communicated with people all over the world. During the late 1940s and mid 1950s he had his own recording company (The Oxford Recording Company). I saw the library of recordings in his basement. I believe he was also a pilot.

He wasn't much of a reader, except of the newspaper, and someone told me that he was kind of a genius with the stock market.

Julius Baker's first instrument was the violin, but he found more success as a flutist (his father was a flutist--and they wrote letters to one another in Yiddish after he left home for Eastman). He told me that the reason he went into music was so that he could get an education. He was a unique human being who was respected and adored by his colleagues, at least from what I saw. He loved being "a regular guy," and would (and did) start conversations with anyone about anything. 

Julius Baker’s favorite musicians were Jascha Heifetz, David Nadien, and Emil Gilels. He found ways to make the flute sound like a violin (a passion that I shared with him), and he could blend with any instrument in the orchestra. He had an array of colors on the flute including some that were kind of brassy and buzzy in the low register, and had a beautiful rolling vibrato that, unlike other flutists of the time, involved the whole air column (like the vibrato of a singer) and not the mouth and throat (you can listen to John Wummer for an example of that). I can’t stand listening to Wummer, who, as the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic,  represented the state of the art before Baker.

While I was in my twenties you could hear the Baker Sound in the flute sections of every American orchestra, and also in orchestras all over the world. But during the last decade of the twentieth century flute playing took several post-Baker turns. 

One big factor was that instruments improved. During the Baker era there were basically two great American flute makers: Haynes and Powell. Then there were spinoff companies like Brannon (my Powell flute was made by Bickford Brannon before he started his own company) that made all kinds of improvements. Japanese companies started making flutes that were easier to play, and spoke particularly well in the low register (so there wasn't a need to buzz). 

Along with physical improvements to the instrument, excellent teachers of the post-Baker generation found new ways to teach, and a lot of new repertoire appeared involving the whole flute family. Suddenly flute players had an enticing array of musical and intellectual challenges.

Flutists (and all musicians) have been able to record themselves easily, as part of regular practice, for half a century. We can slow recordings down and scrub messy passages clean through careful practice. We can even look at images of the sound waves on our phones, and work on the contours to make everything sound perfect. Clean playing that is perfectly in tune and in perfect rhythm wins auditions, and a conservatory education is all about teaching students to win auditions.

I have heard some of that audition-winning clean-as-a-whistle flute playing in person, and have certainly been impressed. The current generation of teachers working in colleges and conservatories (people who began teaching in the twenty-first century) have done an excellent job at training highly capable flutists.

But I doubt that I would be able to distinguish the unique voice of one pristine flute player from this generation of flutists in their twenties from another from behind a screen or on a recording. And there is something kind of sad about that.

Fifteen Minutes of Posture Pilates

I love Rachel Lawrence's Pilates videos. Her The Girl with the Pilates Mat YouTube channel has been a part of our lives for many years.

Today I am facing a very long day of driving, rehearsing, playing into the night, and driving again, so I thought I'd fortify myself by doing this fairly new short video to strengthen my back muscles and improve my posture.

I'm putting it here to share with you (of course), but also so that I can find it easily to do again on days like this.



This photo is from the concert we (an ensemble from the Champaign Urbana Symphony Orchestra) played last August. It looks like the weather will be just as perfect this year.

I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms

I was, of course, curious about the title. The man who knew Brahms was the son of a Viennese pharmacist who was delivering medicine for Brahms to the home of his friend Eduard Hanslick. This man, who Nancy Shear, the writer of this memoir, met in the library of the Philadelphia Orchestra, also knew Mahler.

I was also intrigued by what I hoped would be descriptions of the work of an orchestral librarian. Though I am happy with the path in music that I have taken, there was one point during my early teens when I used to hang around the Berkshire Music Center music library that was housed backstage in the Theater at Tanglewood mainly so I could watch the people working there write with their italic pens and I could pick their brains.

It is indeed rare to find a memoir written by a librarian, particularly a music librarian, but there was enough librarian-related stuff here to satisfy my particular needs.

Mostly this book concerns the growth of a music-loving teenager who played the cello, and her path into and through the world of music by way of her working relationships with librarians and orchestral musicians and her personal relationships with some of the most powerful men in the "old school" musical world of the twentieth century.

Shear approached Leopold Stokowski the morning of February 3, 1964 and asked him if she could come to attend a rehearsal. I suppose the pleasure of having an eager teenage girl with blond hair (who, according to her grown-up publicity photo must have been pretty as a child) ask to attend a rehearsal, even if rehearsals were strictly closed, outweighed the idea of breaking her heart. That began a long working relationship which became an intimate personal one, but, thank goodness, only after Shear had become an adult.

She offers a great deal of insight into the mind and manner of Stokowski. Some of it I knew, and some I didn't. I don't share the general adoration for Stokowski's work that some do, but I can save that for another post.

Shear, who must have kept a careful diary during those years, also writes at length about Eugene Ormandy and Mstislav Rostropovich. She was particularly close with Rostropovich, and the picture she paints of him is a genuine likeness of the man I observed giving masterclasses at Tanglewood in the 1970s. Her portrait is much more intimate, and I would say is required reading for people who admire him and his work.

Another important element in the book (and I would say the most important element) is the look at how a woman fared professionally in the world of music in the 1960s and the 1970s. Shear, who was certainly qualified for an orchestra library job after her five years of work at in the Philadelphia Orchestra's library, her work in the rental library of Theodore Presser, and her work as a freelance editors (even working with Vincent Presichetti), didn't get the job because she was a woman.

Her interviewer asked her what would happen if her husband wouldn't want her to work at some point (she wasn't married, and didn't intend to get married). He also asked her how she could carry all the heavy parts, scores, and folders. She replied that she could make two trips or use a cart with wheels. She did manage to get a job at the Curtis Institute in her home town of Philadelphia (she called Rudolf Serkin, a frequent soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, who knew that they needed a librarian who could manage orchestra rehearsals and out-of-town concerts). That gave her summers free, so she could go visit Leopold Stokowski, who had left Philadelphia for England.

And the story becomes most interesting. I won't spoil it for you.

 You can find out more about the book here.

Bach to Haydn in Plain Sight

We wake up to such awful news every day. Every day. And every day I do my best to keep it together by practicing Bach and Haydn on the violin, the viola, and the piano.

It gives me a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day, and gives me something to look forward to for the next day. Rinse and repeat.

I hope that this terrible period in history will end, and I hope that it ends in such a way that I can play Bach and Haydn to celebrate the beginning of better times. But in the meantime I am so very grateful that I have this music to play.

The Alma Mahler Doll

You can read all about it here, in the Public Domain Review, one of the great places on the internet.

Notes from Underground

I really enjoy the fact that my little space here in the musical internets, on a platform designed for sharing thoughts rather than for making money, is visited by a handful of people who are interested in engaging on mostly musical matters.

So much has changed in the political landscape of the country I happen to live in. But as far as I can "see" as I read about history mostly through literature and music, political landscapes always change. Little pockets of civilization happen within larger pockets of civilization here and there, and if we are lucky those creative people leave their mark in the form of music, art, or literature (including plays and poetry, of course).

If we are lucky there are (or were) people who have the wherewithal to recognize when something is of value. If we are really lucky there are (or were) people who are able to see and hear value that goes beyond the price that someone can get for it, whatever it is. And then anything that survives across the centuries and cultures is a tremendous gift from those kind (and sometimes greedy) souls who managed to preserve it from harm during times of war, natural disasters, or simply natural decay.

I feel so fortunate to have spent my entire life (up to this point) in the safety of a democratic society. Whether that safety will be preserved throughout the lives of our children and our grandchildren is not something I can be sure of. But something about me feels assured that the things I value in life will endure in spite of how governments change, if only because they have endured.

I think of CPE Bach and his servitude in the court of Frederic the Great (he was hired as an accompanist, and would never become promoted to the role of court composer). I think of the Mozart family's struggles with monarchs. I think of Haydn who worked as a musical servant until his patron was no longer in need of his services. I think of Beethoven who, despite having a less-than-gracious personality, developed relationships with the very musical Viennese aristocracy, only to have them stomped on by Napoleon. I think of Schubert, who, as a teacher, didn't make enough money to marry his fianceé at a time when local laws decreed how much a man had to make in order to marry. She married someone else, and he got syphilis.

But a lot of the music, thankfully, has been preserved. A lot of the music that was played or written down over the past several thousand years was not preserved, and what it was and how it sounded we will never know.

The business of music had a great ascension during the 19th century. Thanks to enterprising instrument makers and publishers, not to mention performing establishments and salons, musical life was rich and varied. And patrons were also rich and varied.

Wagner and Liszt lived like royalty. Brahms, the Schumanns, the Mendelssohns, and their friends made excellent livings playing concerts and teaching. Opera singers like Pauline Viardot were in positions where they could live from and for their art. Verdi made enough money to build a retirement home for singers.

And then came recordings. Edison, being the brilliant inventor/opportunist that he was, managed to get recorded music (performed by the most recognizable artists of the day) and the machines used to play it into living rooms across America, and around the world.

The twentieth century, for a variety of reasons, and mostly through European musicians relocating to New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles, was the American musical century, at least as far as “classical” music is concerned.

My childhod was subsidized by the Boston Symphony (my father was a member). And the musician's union made it possible for musicians to work for fair wages and under safe conditions.

The support of very wealthy people living in a democratic society made all this possible. Those wealthy people also supported institutions of higher learning, and there was money from the government for research that created possibilies for science and medicine that went far beyond what anyone could imagine in the twentieth century.

Now the government seems to be systematically kneecapping every institution: educational, scientific, and even cultural (though the powers that be don't--thankfully, and for the moment--seem to know what may or may not be of value). But education, science, and culture cannot be destroyed. Scientists will move elsewhere. Culture (as I know it) can move underground, a place where it has gone from time to time across the millenia. And under the umbrella of culture we have music, art, history, poetry, drama, and education. Religion, in some of its forms, might go there as well.

Individual human beings, being mortal, have finite lifetimes. Those of us who have something to share with the rest of our race (the human race, of course), can do our best to share the richness of what we know and where we have been with the generations that will, undoubtedly, follow us.

If the trajectory that I see (I'm thinking that we could be all speaking Russian, for example) is somehow averted, we still need to keep both our wits and skills about us.

So rather than spending all your time fretting about where things are going, I would suggest doing everything in your power to resist using artificial intelligence to do your researching and writing, read literature you have always wanted to read, watch films that you have always wanted to watch, follow new paths to find books and films you have never known about, and engage in as many in-person musical activities you can, whether as a participant or as a listener.

How close we have gotten to general acceptance of the notion that people can love who they choose to love. How close we have gotten to the idea of having the decision to be a parent (or not be) one that any person can make. How close we have gotten to the (obvious) notion that women and men are equal both intellectually and creatively, and it is up to the individual person to develop that intellect and that creativity.  

During my sixty-six years of life I have watched technology and human understanding move forward by leaps and bounds, at least in what we call the developed world. Let's hope that the backwards fall (involving war, famine, natural disasters due to climate change, and repression) that we are now experiencing in real time is one that the human race can recover from in the twenty-first century. 

The Little Fiddle, and the Parlor Guitar

There comes a time, it seems, at least in the musical universe when things come together. Yesterday was such a day.

We went to St. Louis to meet our son, who was there for the day on a business trip. We had a great lunch and a visit to the soap store in the Hill, and then, simply because I thought they would both be enchanted and amazed by Geoff Seitz's violin shop, we stopped in there. I had been to the shop many times before, but never with Michael.

Geoff had "my" little fiddle, an instrument made in 1791 that I had met and "mingled with" on many a visit, all tuned up (I did let him know we were coming), but I really did not expect that it would come home with me.

I had been expecting for years that I would inherit my father's Scarampella violin, but circumstances must have changed since I spoke about it with him several years before his death. 

Of all the instruments I have played over the years, I have never had the opportunity to choose one for myself. I have had a flute, a piccolo, a baroque flute, and a violin made for me, before I really knew what to ask for. I bought a viola at a garage sale. One recorder was given to me as a gift, and the others I bought "off the rack" without knowing what to look for in a recorder. The flute I have now was my mother's, and my viola and viola d'amore were both my father's. Our piano (which I love) came to us for free from the radio station where I once worked.

Though I have chosen instruments for others, and I though have chosen bows for myself, I have never been able to "meet" and fall in love with an instrument that one day would be mine.

Twenty-five years ago my father gave his Becker instrument to my brother Marshall, and he gave an instrument he no longer had use for to me as well, just to be fair, I guess.  After Marshall's death I inherited the Becker from both my parents (it is complicated). As soon as I tried the Becker, I no longer had any desire to play the viola my father gave to me, so I made a contract with Geoff to sell it for me.

On the way to St. Louis I contemplated the possibility of doing a little barter if we happened to find a parlor guitar for Michael (he had been toying with the idea of wanting one for many years) in Geoff's shop, and maybe something for our son, if he found something he wanted.

Geoff happened to have the most beautiful parlor guitar I have ever heard or seen: a 19th-century instrument in beautiful condition with a warm, and almost baritone-rich sound. I asked Geoff about doing the barter thing with the guitar and the little fiddle (plus a really nice bow), and he was fine with it.

So now I have a really good violin, an instrument that I have chosen myself. It is not valuable like the Scarampella would be (last I looked they were going for 200 grand), but it has a true soprano violin sound, and an enormous amount of musical character. I think I will call her "Antonia" after the character named Antonio in E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "Councillor Krespel."

And if I choose to imagine that my father would prefer this instrument to the Scarampella (which I do), and if I choose to imagine that Antonia could be, in the spirit of the magic that happens in the Hoffmann story, a kind of inheritance from my father, I can. 

And it is also a great gift that I get to listen to Michael play his remarkable new instrument.

And they sound great together.

Flute Etudes

During the almost two decades I devoted to being a flutist I spent thousands of hours practicing flute etudes. Even though I know that flute playing really should be done by people for whom it really is their voice, there is a part of that period of my life that I still embrace.

I do, for example, love writing for the instrument, and I particularly love it when something I write is played by a honest-to-goodness great flutist. I have been fortunate to have known many.

When I was asked to write a group of flute etudes for the Illinois Music Teachers Association last February, I shamelessly "asked" for my highest ideals of flute playing, while trying to make the music accessible enough to be played and understood by high school flutists.

I just came across these video recordings made by Jonathan Keeble, the flute professor at the University of Illinois (and sometimes principal flutist in the Champaign Urbana Symphony Orchestra), and after hearing him play the two "senior" etudes, the flutist's heart that beat in my heart through much of my teens and all of my twenties is still a-flutter.